Tag Archives: AI

robot friends

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Last night we watched Jurassic Park 3 and today found you can have a little dinosaur all of your own!

Pleo Dinosaur Sony have robot dogs, Phillips robot cats (albeit stuck sitting in one place) but Ugobe have little robot dinosaurs called Pleo. In the videos they do move like little baby creatures and the lady in the shopping mall coos over one as she strokes it.

Central to Pleo seems to be:

  1. Designing Sociable Robotsembodiment – they feel through 40 sensors and move in their environment
  2. emotion – they have a relatively complex model of basic drives rather like Cynthia Breazwal describes in her book “Designing Sociable Robots“.

This seems to pay off in people’s reactions, both on Pleo’s own videos (well they would!), but also in owner’s plogs (sic) … one owner says:

“she acts just like a cat concerning keyboards.. just crawl on the darn thing while I’m typing! I know Penny,. you’re so cute it doesn’t matter what you do. But you should have a little sensor strip in your butt to spank when you’re bad1 or to pat gently to urge you to go explore. Go to sleep my little love” ArcticLotus

people play wht Pleo
Pleos making friends :-/

For researchers there is an open architecture so it should be possible to play oops experiment with them 🙂 The API doesn’t seem to be published yet, so wait until you get your cheque books out!

people play wht Pleo

  1. This could get us into the territory of agent abuse![back]

Single-track minds – centralised thinking and the evidence of bad models

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Another post related to Clark’s “Being there” (see previous post on this). The central thesis of Clark’s book is that we should look at people as reactive creatures acting in the environment, not as disembodied minds acting on it. I agree wholeheartedly with this non-dualist view of mind/body, but every so often Clark’s enthusiasm leads a little too far – but then this forces reflection on just what is too far.

In this case the issue is the distributed nature of cognition within the brain and the inadequacy of central executive models. In support of this, Clark (p.39) cites Mitchel Resnick at length and I’ll reproduce the quote:

“people tend to look for the cause, the reason, the driving force, the deciding factor. When people observe patterns and structures in the world (for example, the flocking patterns of birds or foraging patterns of ants), they often assume centralized causes where none exist. And when people try to create patterns or structure in the world (for example, new organizations or new machines), they often impose centralized control where none is needed.” (Resnick 1994, p.124)1

The take home message is that we tend to think in terms of centralised causes, but the world is not like that. Therefore:

(i) the way we normally think is wrong

(ii) in particular we should expect non-centralised understanding of cognition

However, if our normal ways of thinking are so bad, why is it that we have survived as a species so long? The very fact that we have this tendency to think and design in terms of centralised causes, even when it is a poor model of the world, suggests some advantage to this way of thinking.

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  1. Mitchel Resnik (1994). Turtles Termites and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds. MIT Press.[back]

multiple representations – many chairs in the mind

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I have just started reading Andy Clark’s “Being There”1 (maybe more on that later), but early on he reflects on the MIT COG project, which is a human-like robot torso with decentralised computation – coherent action emerging through interactions not central control.

This reminded me of results of brain scans (sadly, I can’t recall the source), which showed that the areas in the brain where you store concepts like ‘chair’ are different from those where you store the sound of the word – and also I’m sure the spelling of it also.

This makes sense of the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon, you know that there is a word for something, but can’t find the exact word. Even more remarkable is that of you know words in different languages you can know this separately for each language.

So, musing on this, there seem to be very good reasons why, even within our own mind, we hold multiple representations for the “same” thing, such as chair, which are connected, but loosely coupled.

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  1. Andy Clark. Being There. MIT Press. 1997. ISBN 0-262-53156-9. book@MIT[back]